Can AI Coexist With Privacy? Proton’s Andy Yen Says It Will Have To

人工智能能否与隐私共存？Proton 创始人 Andy Yen 认为必须如此

In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology. It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone’s data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever.

在许多隐私倡导者眼中，人工智能不过是另一种监控技术。它增强了在线追踪和现实世界的间谍工具，通过筛选海量个人数据来生成结果，并诱导用户与云端托管的大型语言模型分享他们内心深处的秘密和欲望。监控资本主义造就了人工智能，而人工智能也投桃报李，使监控变得更加强大，让依赖监控的企业比以往任何时候都拥有更多数据、更加盈利。

Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He’s the founder and CEO of Proton, one of the world’s most popular encryption-focused tech companies. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product—whether people want it or not—is driving new users in droves to Proton’s products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet.

Andy Yen 是科技界最具影响力的人物之一，他将人工智能等同于隐私侵犯。他是 Proton 的创始人兼首席执行官，该公司是全球最受欢迎的专注于加密技术的科技公司之一。他表示，将人工智能强行整合到每一款消费级科技产品中的做法——无论用户是否需要——正推动大量新用户转向 Proton 的产品。简单来说，这些产品就是 Gmail、Google Docs、Sheets、Calendar 和 Meet 等谷歌服务的端到端加密版本。

Yet Yen is not anti-AI, he says, any more than he is anti-internet. In late June, Proton released the latest version of its very own AI chatbot, Lumo—just one way that Proton is integrating AI ever more deeply into its suite of tools, but seeking to do so in a way that’s more voluntary and preserves users’ privacy far more than the typical tech giant.

然而，Yen 表示他并不反对人工智能，就像他不反对互联网一样。6 月下旬，Proton 发布了其自主研发的 AI 聊天机器人 Lumo 的最新版本。这只是 Proton 将人工智能更深入地整合到其工具套件中的方式之一，但他们力求以一种更具自主性、且比典型科技巨头更能保护用户隐私的方式来实现这一目标。

That willingness to embrace the apparent contradiction between AI and privacy is just one way in which Yen’s views don’t cut cleanly across party lines—from current US politics to the lessons of Edward Snowden’s leaks to the question of the best corporate structure for a tech company that’s not solely designed to maximize profit. You can read our conversation about all of it here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

这种拥抱人工智能与隐私之间明显矛盾的意愿，只是 Yen 的观点不完全符合党派界限的体现之一——从当前的美国政治，到爱德华·斯诺登泄密事件带来的教训，再到如何为一家并非仅仅以利润最大化为目标的科技公司构建最佳企业结构。你可以在此处阅读我们关于所有这些话题的对话，或在你获取播客的任何平台收听。

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

（本次采访为篇幅和清晰度经过编辑。）

ANDY GREENBERG: I want to start by asking about your background and the origin story of Proton. You’re a trained particle physicist. You worked at CERN, the nuclear research facility, but you were inspired by the leaks of Edward Snowden back in 2013 to create Proton, right?

**ANDY GREENBERG：**我想先问一下你的背景和 Proton 的起源故事。你是一位受过专业训练的粒子物理学家。你曾在核研究机构欧洲核子研究中心（CERN）工作，但你是受到 2013 年爱德华·斯诺登泄密事件的启发才创立了 Proton，对吗？

ANDY YEN: I’m not actually a tech person or even an entrepreneur by training, so I really happened into this field a little bit by accident. I used to work at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a particle accelerator. It’s the largest in the world.

**ANDY YEN：**我其实并非科班出身的科技人员，甚至也不是受过训练的企业家，所以我进入这个领域纯属偶然。我过去曾在大型强子对撞机工作，那是一个粒子加速器，也是世界上最大的加速器。

I’ve heard of it …

我听说过它……

Yes. And what you may not know is that every once in a while, the accelerator gets turned off for upgrades, and these upgrades can take quite a bit of time. So Proton was created in one of those upgrade cycles, where the physicists had a little bit more free time because the experiment wasn’t running, and they were upgrading it.

是的。你可能不知道的是，加速器每隔一段时间就会关闭进行升级，而这些升级可能需要相当长的时间。所以 Proton 就是在其中一个升级周期中诞生的，当时物理学家们因为实验暂停而有了更多空闲时间，他们正在进行升级工作。

So this is just, like, a period when Swiss physicists get to sit around over beers and think about privacy technologies?

所以这就像是瑞士物理学家们坐在一起喝啤酒，顺便思考隐私技术的时期？

Yeah, yeah. This was the summer after Snowden had come out about government surveillance. So Snowden really informed the world about mass surveillance at the government scale. But if you imagine what the NSA knows about you and then compare that to, say, what Meta or Google might know, it’s really quite tiny.

没错，没错。那是斯诺登曝光政府监控后的那个夏天。斯诺登确实让全世界了解了政府层面的大规模监控。但如果你想象一下美国国家安全局（NSA）对你的了解，再将其与 Meta 或谷歌可能掌握的信息相比，你会发现前者其实微不足道。

So the realization we had sitting in that cafeteria was, yeah, government surveillance is a problem, but the much bigger problem is corporate surveillance. I would argue today that if you look at the US government, they don’t even need the NSA. They can just directly subpoena Google, Facebook, and these giant companies, which they do on a very routine basis.

所以我们在食堂里意识到的问题是：是的，政府监控是一个问题，但更大的问题是企业监控。我今天敢说，如果你看看美国政府，他们甚至不需要 NSA。他们可以直接传唤谷歌、Facebook 这些巨头公司，而且他们经常这样做。

So inadvertently, the business model of the internet had brought us into an age where we had the highest amount of surveillance at any time in human history, and that seemed [like it was] really not the way the internet should have gone. And that’s what really motivated us to think, what are ways we can address this problem?

因此，互联网的商业模式在无意中将我们带入了一个人类历史上监控程度最高的时代，这似乎真的不是互联网应该发展的方向。这正是促使我们思考如何解决这一问题的动力所在。

Proton is really a response to that. Today, the default business model of the internet is that everything you do is recorded, shared, monetized, and abused for purposes that are beyond your control. And we should really build an internet where privacy isn’t an add-on that you can maybe get if you go through five menus and click ten different buttons; it should be the default.

Proton 实际上就是对这一现状的回应。如今，互联网默认的商业模式是：你所做的一切都被记录、共享、货币化，并被用于你无法控制的目的。我们真的应该建立一个互联网，让隐私不再是一个需要通过翻阅五个菜单、点击十个不同按钮才能获得的附加功能；它应该是默认设置。

And that was what led to the creation of Proton Mail back in 2014.

这就是 2014 年 Proton Mail 诞生的原因。

And if you can bring us up to the present, where is Proton today, for people who may not be familiar with it?

如果你能带我们了解一下现状，对于那些可能不太熟悉 Proton 的人来说，它现在发展得如何？

In 2014, if I went out on the street and I asked somebody, “How does Google or Facebook make money?”—probably one in 10 people would give me the correct answer. Today, if I go out into the world, it’s not 10 out of 10, but probably six or seven would actually know the answer. What that really means is the concern that people have for their data online has massively increased in the past decade.

2014 年，如果我走上街头问某人：“谷歌或 Facebook 是如何赚钱的？”——可能十个人里只有一个人能给我正确答案。今天，如果我再问，虽然不是十个人全都知道，但可能有六七个人能答出来。这真正意味着，在过去十年里，人们对在线数据的关注度已经大幅提升。

So Proton went from having a couple hundred thousand users to now over a hundred million. And email is the core of Google’s business model. You know, the reason Google can track you is that you’re logged in, and the reason you’re logged in is that you have a Gmail. And so if you are able to attack that piece, that’s actually the most effective piece to first dislodge somebody out of the Google ecosystem.

因此，Proton 的用户数从几十万增长到了现在的超过一亿。电子邮件是谷歌商业模式的核心。你知道，谷歌之所以能追踪你，是因为你处于登录状态，而你之所以登录，是因为你有 Gmail。所以，如果你能攻克这一环节，这实际上是将用户从谷歌生态系统中剥离出来的最有效手段。

So we started with email, did a calendar, file storage, documents, essentially recreating the entire Google Workspace, but in a more privacy-first way, and I would say without the creepy business model that Google employs.

所以我们从电子邮件开始，接着做了日历、文件存储、文档，本质上是重建了整个 Google Workspace，但以一种更注重隐私的方式，而且我可以肯定地说，没有谷歌那种令人毛骨悚然的商业模式。

So how many people have you actually dislodged from Google? How many minds have you freed?

那么，你们实际上已经让多少人脱离了谷歌？你们解放了多少人的思想？

We’ve dislodged a hundred million people so far, and we hope to dislodge a lot more in the decades to come.

到目前为止，我们已经让一亿人脱离了（谷歌），我们希望在未来的几十年里能让更多人脱离。

That’s an impressive number. How many of them are paying customers?

这是一个令人印象深刻的数字。其中有多少是付费用户？

Well, it’s a freemium business model, so most of them use it for free, but the typical conversion rates that you see for freemium business models are usually between 1 and 3 percent, and Proton sits in that bucket as well.

嗯，这是一种免费增值商业模式，所以大多数人是免费使用的。但你所看到的免费增值模式的典型转化率通常在 1% 到 3% 之间，Proton 也处于这个区间。

You mentioned a couple of these landmarks in the history of surveillance capitalism, starti…

你提到了监控资本主义历史上的几个里程碑，开始……